I smirked at the parent comment, and it didn't even slightly occur to me that someone might interpret its intent as serious and literal until I saw your comment.
As far as I can tell, there's no level of satire so heavy-handed and unsubtle that it won't get a reply taking it seriously. If anything, the more obviously ridiculous your suggestion, the more urgently HNers want to disagree.
Yeah, I don't think "surely no one seriously believes this" is viable now, if it was before. Of course, what you choose to do with that conclusion is still up to you.
I've been on the internet a long time. There are enough weirdos out there to make you understand humor doesn't scale, and it definitely doesn't scale across cultures.
Things are different when you actually know people but we killed that when we killed forums.
tbf, there's also almost no level of satire about business ideas so heavy handed and unsubtle that some HNers won't think it's an idea worth pitching to an investor...
The "non-ingestion allergen exposure" thing is a dangerous and common misconception, and the business-idea "joke" doesn't hinge on knowing or recognizing this, nor does it encourage questioning that part of the premise.
I think it’s actually a pretty good comment. Most people would not know that skin and food exposure are different. This is something you are told as a parent though. E.g. My daughter had a skin reaction to (chicken) eggs at week 29 but tolerates them just fine as food and we were not particularly concerned but if no one had told us I would have thought it was a problem.
As far as I can tell, there's no level of satire so heavy-handed and unsubtle that it won't get a reply taking it seriously. If anything, the more obviously ridiculous your suggestion, the more urgently HNers want to disagree.